Always a Warm Greeting for Students and Homeless

By Ashley Welch

Rachel Duhill-Fuchel often jokes that she never leaves the street where she lives and works.

The assistant principal of the Global Learning Collaborative NYC at the Brandeis High School Campus, she works 10 or more hours a day before making the one-block trip home to husband Kevin and children Jake, 16, and Georgia, 11.

When walking around her home (and work) turf, it seems like everyone knows Duhill-Fuchel–and she knows them.

“Hello, Nathaniel,” she said to a homeless man sitting on a stoop. “How are you doing today?”

“Oh, I’m fine, Rachel. How are you?” he replied.

“Hey, you guys should really get back to class. You’re late,” she said to a group of students walking back to school from lunch. Though she is scolding the teens, her tone is as friendly as when she was talking to Nathaniel just moments before.

Duhill-Fuchel, 50, stops to greet nearly every person who passes by with a smile and genuine concern for how they are doing. She also knows each one of their names.

“Just a little thing like remembering names and saying ‘hi’ and ‘good morning’ can make such a difference in someone’s day,” she said.

An educator for over 25 years, Duhill-Fuchel has taught in New York City, Boston and Mexico. Though she has many administrative duties as assistant principal at Global Learning, which she helped open in 2009 with the aim of helping students become global citizens, she is still heavily involved in her students’ lives.

“A lot of counseling, a lot of problem solving, a lot of trying to heal pain and a lot of supporting people just going through life” are how she describes a typical day at work.

From identity crises to teen moms to children of broken homes, Duhill-Fuchel has seen and dealt with it all.

“We run the gamut here,” she joked.

She said students are comfortable going to her with troubling situations because she and the rest of the staff have worked hard to gain their trust.

“Many times kids will come to us before they go to their parents,” she said, “because they feel comfortable with us.”

When walking through the 380-student school (which spans one and a half hallways on the third and fourth floors of Brandeis High School), it is easy to see how Duhill-Fuchel accomplished this.

Though she’s constantly enforcing a no-hat rule and reminding teens to get to class on time, it is clear she has a genuine interest in the well-being of the students. She is in tune to all of their needs and remembers details of their lives that they share with her.

“We are all in this together—I said that way before High School Musical said it” she said with a laugh. “We have to look out for each other and we have to be kind to each other. And we have to have a little bit of a sense of humor about it all, too.”